I hate conference calls. Today I have two, one where I have to help diagnose problems with a site I've never seen, know nothing about, and can't access, and another where I have to answer questions from a developer who apparently does not know what a form post is. Two key coworkers are out of the office, one of whom has all kinds of secret knowledge that no one else has. Naturally there are issues occurring that require his knowledge. The weather is crappy, Twitter is down, Facebook is practically down, I didn't get much sleep last night, and my guts are twisted in knots.

I hate the phrase "perfect storm," but it keeps coming to mind.

UPDATE: A coworker forwarded this horrifying article. If the terrorists are going after our internets now, I'm joining the army* and going after them! This aggression will not stand!

UPDATE 3: Woo hoo! One of my calls was canceled. It's the one I was less frightened about, but still, one fewer conference call is always good.

UPDATE 4: Well, I made it through the call. Mostly it was me saying, "I don't know," or, "Well, I'm totally guessing here, but this is what could be happening..." Argh. But hey, looks like Twitter's back!

UPDATE 5: Looking back on it, today really wasn't that awful. I didn't have a nervous breakdown or get shot or stabbed or anything. I came through it mostly unscathed. I'll definitely be happy when this week is over and my coworkers have returned. But it could have been worse.

I have WAY too much stuff going on right now, at work, on Phillyist, in my life. Have I mentioned that we're selling our condo and buying a house? It all kind of happened at once. Anyway, in the middle of all this stuff going on, we're just going to go away for the weekend and mostly disconnect from everything, which should be very nice. This means I won't be posting here for a while. (Coincidentally, the Hulk is taking a vacation at exactly the same time!) See you folks on the flipside...

First, some geekynews related to our nation, which I acquired from various sources (Dave sent me the first link, and the second link I got to via Sarcasmo's links).

It was extremely wet yesterday around here. I mean, it was no Florida or anything, but still. A tornado apparently swept through a little shopping mall not very far from our apartment, wreaking various havockses. The hell?

Work was busy today. Argh.

I finally won one of the many Hero Quest auctions I've been involved in since I got back into the game a while ago. Yay! So pretty soon, relatively, the Wizards of Morcar expansion should be winging its way to me across the ocean. Hopefully all that German will be well-translated...

And now it's off to movie night, where I'll be screening the crazed Azumi. But first, some food, because, man. I'm dying here.

Btw, I was going to link to my old post on Hero Quest up there somewhere, but it looks like my archives page is caught in an infinite loop or something. Suck. I'd better get to work on that at some point.

Oh, yeah, and I finally checked out Soul Calibur II last night. It pretty much rocks. It's exactly like Soul Calibur, complete with the random, meaningless chunks of pretentious narration, except it's got even more features and cool stuff, like extra weapons that you can buy for your characters, and a playable Link from Legend of Zelda--if you have the GameCube version, anyway.

Okay, I think I'm done now. This post would have been better and less rambling if I weren't so tired and hungry.

If you didn't think they could make a musical of anything, well...you were wrong (thanks to Yagathai for the link)! This made me think of that Onion article entitled "Bush Cites The Last Starfighter As Inspiration For Entering Politics" (which I would link to, except it is so old that it is now available only to those with Onion Premium subscriptions, which I do not have). I imagined Bush starring in the musical, singing his little baboon heart out. Sigh.

Yesterday, due to a birthday miracle, my Star Wars DVDs arrived, yet a day after they shipped. Woo hoo! Of course, I haven't had a chance to watch them at all yet, but someday soon...

I also got some lovely presents from poppy yesterday, including the "classic" version of Risk (which comes in a really cool wooden box with a sliding lid, and also has the original text in the rulebook and the original map on the board), and a couple of pretty great CDs with pretty great titles that I listened to today at work: The Hives's Tyrannosaurus Hives and Modest Mouse's Good News for People Who Love Bad News. Both have a great, hard, raw sound to them that I really enjoy. I was bopping around a lot in my chair today.

Today was a pretty great day at work, actually. I started out confused and frightened, after Amy tried to explain something to me about my latest project, but as soon as I sat down with it and looked it over myself, I figured it out really quickly. Later on, Amy and Dave came by to take a look at my work, and suddenly these bugs appeared that I hadn't seen before and I didn't know what was going on. Sure enough, as soon as they walked away, I figured it out and fixed it. I think I'm sort of like that guy in Mystery Men who can only be invisible when nobody's looking; I'm only a good programmer when nobody is watching me.

Anyway, the point is, it's always a good day when I get stuff figured out and get stuff done. Very satisfying. And then there was game night! In which we finally played our first "legal" game of "Tigris and Euphrates" (we'd only played it with two players before, which you're not really supposed to do) and introduced Super Tarzan to the great and excellent game that is "Puerto Rico." Both are German strategy games which involve laying down tiles and tokens on boards, like all German games. They're pretty great.

Anyways, I'd say that's it for tonight. Tomorrow I hope to go see a movie in the afternoon/early evening. I think it shall be the pulpy goodness of Sky Captain. Aww, yeah.

About
Welcome to the blog of Jim Genzano, writer, web developer, husband, father, and enjoyer of things like the internet, movies, music, games, and books. For a more detailed run-down of who I am and what goes on here, read this.